Parents and educators often wish to provide young people with electronic devices, such as laptops, portable music players, or mobile phones, for entertainment, educational, convenience, and safety reasons. Very often these electronic devices contain digital cameras, and, in many cases, provide a way to transfer captured images to an electronic storage medium as well as communicate with other devices wirelessly.
While it may be desirable for people under the age of majority to possess these devices, there are currently no controls in place which can prevent the digital camera from being used in an inappropriate manner, such as capturing or distributing sexually explicit material.
Some technology already exists to ensure that young people cannot access inappropriate websites while using a personal computer (NetNanny, for example), but these technologies only restrict access to content that has already been archived or published elsewhere.
For example, an existing content filtering system is illustrated in FIG. 1. In such a system, a user 10 of a personal computer 12 has access to the internet 30. The personal computer 12 comprises a camera 14, and can run various software applications 16, which may include internet browsing software and email 18, for example, as is conventional. Data may be retrieved from an archive, such as an Internet website 32, and then stored in memory 20 on the personal computer. A content filtering application 22 running on the personal computer then examines the content in memory, and decides if said content should be made available to the user 10. Content generated from other sources, such as a digital camera 14, are not analyzed by the content filter. Other applications running on the device are still able to access local content sources, such as images generated from the camera, without the use of the content filter. It is important to note that any applications must be made specifically aware of the content filtering system if they are to enforce content restriction.
Known solutions have not addressed the issue of content that is being created by the young person, e.g. content created by a digital camera. Thus, there is a need to restrict users, particularly young people, from using a digital camera to create and/or distribute content, such as sexually explicit images, that may be socially or legally inappropriate.